We have been asking the question of ‘What does it looks like to love?’ for the past several months. I trust that the significance of that question and its ‘descriptions’ have begun to infiltrate your heart and your daily experiences.
This past week, we saw in I John 4 that “mature love cast out fear,” for fear is caught up in the potential of punishment. As followers of Jesus, we have come to understand that our punishment for the true moral guilt we had before God has been been transferred to the shoulders of Christ on the cross. He has taken our guilt on Himself and taken the punishment on Himself. Therefore we have been set free to live with abandon and yet responsibly in light of His amazing grace.
The freedom that we have inherited from God does not always manifest itself in our lives as much as it should. We often live in fear of all sorts of things that prevent us from loving others. Our fear traps us in ourselves and in protecting ourselves. Therefore we can’t get to focusing on others and how to love them. The process of living freely to love others is just that, a process. We have to learn a new way of living and loving that is quite different from living in fear. Louisa May Alcott, the 19th century American novelist and poet, once said, “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning how to sail my ship.” I think the same is true for us in learning how to ‘sail our ship’ day in and day out, without being afraid of the storms that come our way.
Now let’s be clear… storms come and go as a constant pattern in life. Some of the storms are minor and cause little, if any, damage. However, some of the storms in our lives are anything but minor. Some of them are tragic and inflict pain and suffering like we can hardly describe. It would seem rational to to want to avoid these sort of storms. The problem is that we can seldom actually avoid storms, they come as a natural phenomenon of the human experience in a broken world. So, rather than living in fear of the storms of life, we learn to navigate them with God’s guiding hand on ours. He is the one who is there and more than interested in sustaining us through the difficulties. His presence does not always make the storm disappear but He gives hope that not only will the storm eventually dissipate, but there is value in the storm itself.
Therefore, fear does not have to paralyze us and prevent us from loving. We can trust that God has our lives in mind and inside His sovereign control. We can ‘cast out fear’ because of the one we know and love… the one who loved us first!
Yours,
Kevin